Documentaries about a heartwarming companion animal are something cynical smartypants avoid, but if the animal’s a wolf, that does make things more interesting.

Bruce Weide and Pat Tucker had Koani dumped on them and, faced with putting her down, opted to adopt. “Oh, great,” the local vet recalls thinking. “More people who think they can turn a wolf into a dog.”

You can’t, and the couple doesn’t try, unless you count building a tunnel to the living room so the wolf could come inside as much as it pleased. To give Koani an outlet, they buy an actual dog, Indy, and the animals bond. But wolves do not ever become puppy-cuddly. Tucker says, “They’re incredibly social, but just being social doesn’t make you nice.”

Alongside this is the long-running debate about reintroducing wolves to the wilderness, and there’s no question the movie considers the strategy irrational. (The guy who compares wolf reintroduction with the Pale Rider passage in Revelations — portending the apocalypse — is a high point of the film.)

Weide and Tucker traveled the country with Koani as “an ambassador for her species” to help people confront their fears of wolves through her. But the film’s discussion of wolf mythology meanders and lacks force. And Koani, so enthralling in home-video footage, seems diminished in her meet-and-greets. It’s hard to get close to a wild creature, and “True Wolf” doesn’t always manage, either.